


Between Curiosity and Caution

by lemonsharks



Category: The Immortals - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Animals, Boats and Ships, Canon Era, Cephalopods, Communication, Communication Failure, Competence, Gen, Language, Misses Clause, Missing Scene, Nonverbal Communication, Octopus, Tentacles, cephalopod cognition, main gift, tentacles: friendly, wild magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 06:21:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5446409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daine makes a new friend. She's never met anyone who doesn't have a central nervous system before.</p><p>(A missing scene from <em>Emperor Mage</em>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Curiosity and Caution

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anthean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthean/gifts).



> Daine is my favorite-favorite character in my first fandom ever, and her magic is easily one of my favorite things about her books. 
> 
> This story was an absolute joy to write--I hope you like it! Happy holidays!

 

Echoes of an unfamiliar mind reaching out to her had been sounding in Daine's head all day. They were faint at first, despite all the water, and made her feel like a group of things far away. Maybe a small flock of birds, but birds would have come down to say hello by now. Fish were too small and twitchy to be whatever this was; whales too large and serene; the pod of dolphins traveling with them to familiar.

The rest of the delegation to Carthak had gone below decks to strategize, while Daine begged off with a headache. Which she did have, from straining to listen for a voice that wasn't  _ there _ every time she almost thought she had found it. She wanted to slip into the water in seal-shape, or up and away for a few hours as a bird, but she had promised best behavior and that she would stick close to the ship on this voyage. 

Kitten chirped at the crew dropping anchor; Daine had scolded her the first day out for undoing knots in one of the nets. They all preferred a fresh catch to salt pork and ship's biscuit. Storm clouds piled atop one another off to the south, and the ship slowed to a stop and rocked in place.

Daine dug into the back of her neck with her fingertips.

A  few minutes later, the mind was still there, curious and vibrating.

Hello-hello-hello-hello-hello? Hello?

The voice had a weight, closer than it had been yet. It was coming from outside the ship, in the water. The words were hard-won, and they ached. She slipped between crewmen and stepped over neat coils of rope and mounded net to get closer to the voice. At the rear, shaded from the glare of the sun setting over the eastern edge of the Great Inland Sea, one slimy cord of an--arm?--oozed up through a narrow gap between boards of the bulwark.

"What  _ are _ you?"

Fuzzy images flared around the edges of her magical senses; the copper fire of her wild magic shifted and roiled like dust in water.  Her eyes throbbed in their sockets, and she thrust  _ that _ sensation as far to the back of her mind as she could. 

"You'll get stuck, here, let--!"

Waves of--of something the likes of which she'd never felt from any of the People, at least the warm-blooded, boney-bodied ones, pushed her back, so hard she felt her feet take a step away from the creature. The arm, through the gap, was joined by another; they were both a deep, rusty red and covered in white suckers along the bottom sides. Could it be a young Kraken?

Daine knew she could hardly adopt such a thing, and her chest seized for a moment at the thought of having to explain the great, small, Immortal scourge of the sea and how it came into her company. Numair would be intrigued, and Alanna might find it funny for a while, but Duke Gareth would be neither one, she was sure. 

The tip of a third arm popped through the hole, no bigger than a plum, and the animal's flesh faded to white and then went red again. She went to the bulwark and looked over the edge; five more arms and a large bulb of what must be a head clinged to the side of the ship. Soon it had squeezed all but one arm and its head through. Daine knelt and tilted her head to the side, mouth slightly open, as she watched the rest of--of  _ it _ \--come aboard.

It shifted, its eyes with their bar-shaped pupils shimmering like opals. She reached a tentative hand, and next she knew her arm was wrapped up to the elbow in cold, wet, and surprisingly strong muscle. Suckers gently pulled at her skin.

"Hello, there," she tried again. "I've never met anyone like you before."

Since coming to Tortall, even at Pirate's Swoop and Numair's tower, she had not encountered a creature like this close enough to touch. She stayed away from fish markets, where she was fair sure this creature's kin would be sold for food. Daine had no desire to take fish-form. She also preferred to catch and kill her own fish quickly and kindly, not to leave them flopping in buckets and gasping for breath. She'd simply not had  _ time _ to visit the tide pools along the coast as often as she wanted.

Daine felt a multitude of things at once, then. A shudder, strong enough she shut down thoughts of the market and the shallow pools. The deck beneath her knees and shins, but also spread out under her folded head, no water to support her here. Her own warm arm, the dying sun soft but also sharp and drying on the top of her head, dangerous. 

Her eyes didn't quite work as they ought, what with seeing herself and her companion from both their points of view at once, fractured and spinning like the words and pictures on the pages of her anatomy book when she stayed awake too long in the light of a guttering candle. 

A flush spread out over her face and neck, and the animal moved its bulbous head to get a better look at her. "Do you speak, little Kraken?"

At once its skin turned nubbly and went almost black; it withdrew three arms from around hers with a series of audible pops. Round bruises were left behind. Someone would have to heal them so the marks did not have to be explained once they arrived in Carthak.

Now, the creature spread out, taking up at least twice the space it had before.

"Did I offend you? Oh, I wish you  _ talked _ ."

The tip of one arm gently wrapped around her hand. Its skin was still dark and pebbled, but at least now the sense of the mind was less--what? Fractured? One but not-one?

Daine blew out an irritated breath.

It gave her pictures, the feel of firm wet sand and coral beneath her, seaweed tickling her all around, and an inky shadow floating above. The arm tightened; the edges of the suckers were rough, toothed. 

Almost definitely  _ not  _ a baby Kraken, then. "Do you have a name?"

She reached out with a tendril of copper fire, burying her magic in the suspension of her companion's. Daine let herself into the flow of it, savoring the strangeness, newness so different from anyone else she had met that she before. A second arm reached out to her free hand and flattened sucker-side down against her palm. 

The simultaneous pop of many detaching suction suction cups, the click of a beak, and a brilliant flash of white against earthy colors, forming stripes and spots before fading back to a gently patterned rusty brown, almost like a tabby-cat. Over it all a broodiness, a choosiness, this  was a mother-of-thousands. Not a name she could repeat, if it was in fact a name. It seemed the whole of an identity. Daine brought her teeth together once, firmly, in poor mimic of the beak-click.

The creature rippled bright and reached out with three more arms. She supposed that meant she'd done well enough, and that it wouldn't mind if she attempted to ride along. The urge to see the world through--Daine clicked her teeth together, imagining the feel of Click's beak surrounded by that strangely-shaped, malleable body--. 

She stilled and evened out her breathing, giggling a little when Click oozed up onto her lap, her cold, slick skin soaking Daine's clothing. An arm or two or three snaked around neck and up onto her cheeks. It  _ tickled _ .

When she opened her mind, a briney chill surrounded her, and then it was as though her mind was a dozen separate minds, all jumbled and only some of them seeing anything at all, but the others full of texture and flavor, salt and warmth and the grit of finely worn sand, the memory of sharp shells with soft, delicious insides. 

Daine couldn't stay; her eyes sprung open of their own accord. Click had covered most of her face and both of her arms and her lap with her body, but she pulled away with pops and pebbling skin, a shocked white all over. Her head pounded behind her eyes, too full too quickly. 

"Is  _ that _ how see and feel--all the time?" she wanted to know. 

Click did not offer an answer. 

_ I wonder if I could take her shape _ , she thought, but her mind would not part into all the pieces she needed. A piece for each arm, for each eye, and a small sliver for the round, wobbling head. 

Click pulled back, slowly at first, and then with startling speed. She flashed brilliant stripey color, and then slipped an arm back through the opening of the bulwark. Daine adjusted her legs in their tailor's seat, and leaned backward with her palms flat on the deck, watching as Click fit herself out the space so small she had no business going through it.

Daine rose when the last arm was still on deck, and leaned against the rail while Click slipped again into the water. 

_ There's so much down there _ , she thought. She could spend the rest of her life in the sea and not encounter all the things there were to find. She could spend the rest of her life wrapped up in those sucker-covered arms and not fully understand just this  _ one _ of the People.

She stayed there for a long time, remembering the split-but-not-broken mind, and trying to figure out how to arrange herself into that shape. The sun had gone down entirely when she realized Kit was pulling on her sleeve and Numair was regarding her with a worried look.

After a moment, she said, "A sea creature with eight arms and a head, what is it called?"

"The name is in Old Thak. It translates to head-foot. Why?"

"No, ah. No reason," she replied, a little dazedly, and ran her fingers over the ringed marks that Click had left behind on her arms.. 

The ship's cook rang his bell for supper. She touched Kitten on the back of the head, following her nose and ears toward food and company that made  _ sense_. 

Once the stars brightened enough to navigate by, they would be on their way again.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from [_An Octopus_](http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/marianne-moore/an-octopus/), by Marianne Moore. 
> 
> Ten or twelve years ago, Tammy had said she had no idea how she would handle Daine encountering a critter with no central nervous system, and I've been thinking about it ever since. 
> 
> The species I had in mind for Click is the [Larger Pacific Striped Octopus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larger_Pacific_striped_octopus), which is weird-weird- _weird_ even by cephalopod standards (cephalopod, btw, means head-foot in Greek).


End file.
